A talented young chef in the Design District sends out a captivating succession of dishes on his elaborate new tasting menu, wrapping it up with a quenelle of candy-cap mushroom ice cream flavored with oak and a slice of walnut tart adorned with tiny pickled chanterelles, delicate herb blossoms and wild carrot flowers.

It’s poetry on a plate.

In Oak Cliff, a seafood-focused chef spoons a ramp pistou around a gorgeous fillet of pan-seared Alaskan halibut, dressing it up with baby shiitakes, tender fava beans, pearl onions, fiddlehead ferns. Atop the fish he sets a small cloud of delicately smoked potato purée.

It feels like something of a transitional time on the Dallas dining scene, as a new generation of chefs is stepping up and showing us the full range of what’s possible on the plate.

The Best in DFW: Chefs honors each year are awarded to heads of kitchen whose cooking is inspired and inspiring.

Creativity, originality and consistently excellent execution are important factors in determining who makes the list, along with a vision. Best in DFW chefs’ menus should be dynamic, not stuck in time, changing with their moods, the seasons, what looks great in the market.

This year, the Best in DFW chefs have two things in common: They’re all cooking in restaurants in Dallas proper, and they all

happen to be men. Two of them — the Mansion Restaurant’s Bruno Davaillon and Tei-An’s Teiichi Sakurai — are four-time winners. David Uygur, chef-owner of Lucia, makes the list for the third consecutive year, and Driftwood’s Omar Flores makes his second appearance. Besides them, we salute newcomers John Tesar, chef-owner of Spoon Bar and Kitchen, and Brian Zenner, executive chef at Belly and Trumpet.

And there’s a third newcomer, too — one we’re singling out for special honors. This year, Matt McCallister, chef-owner of FT33, is our first-ever Chef of the Year.

We’re happy to present — starting with Chef of the Year, and then listed in alphabetical order — this year’s Best in DFW: Chefs. Kudos to all, and thank you for delighting Dallas food lovers with your cooking. ■

CHEF OF THE YEAR

Matt McCallister, FT33

It has been absolutely thrilling to follow 32-year-old McCallister’s development as a chef, from his days at Stephan Pyles, where he started in 2006 with no formal training and wound up heading the kitchen as executive chef in 2009, to the opening of his own restaurant, FT33, just over a year ago.

Leaving Pyles’ flagship restaurant in 2010, McCallister spent nearly two years on the road, cooking in “stages” (informal apprenticeships) at some of the best restaurants in the United States, including Alinea in Chicago, Daniel in New York and Minibar in Washington, D.C. When he returned to Dallas and helped open Campo Modern Country Bistro in late 2011, it was clear we had a major talent in our midst: His rabbit in porchetta and his milk-poached pork with milk pudding sauce, blood pudding, braised prunes and pumpkin-seed butter were nothing short of stunning.

McCallister hit the ground running when he opened his own restaurant, FT33, in October 2012, with a modernist-meets-farm-to-table approach. FT33 earned four stars in a review two months after it opened, which is impressive in itself; it went on to be named 2012 Restaurant of the Year, an honor awarded to the best new restaurant.

Since then, McCallister’s cooking has been evolving at a dizzying pace. Does this fellow ever sleep? His menu changes constantly, and his kitchen has turned out the most exhilarating, impressive, original and exciting dishes of the past year, from an unforgettable uni pancake (which the chef featured at a dinner at the James Beard House in New York in September) to a stunning chicken duo starring a leg that he cured in salt, braised in olive oil and herbs, air-dried then deep-fried. Wow! And that was just one element of a spectacular plate.

McCallister is a forager and gardener as well as a dedicated sourcer, and great ingredients have always been the driving force behind his cooking; he backs it up with technique that doesn’t settle for the tried-and-true, but constantly pushes the envelope. His plates, by the way, are as visually stunning as they are delicious.

Just two weeks ago, McCallister introduced a seven-course tasting menu at FT33, available only Tuesday through Thursday nights. I stopped in last week to experience it, and it does just what such a menu should do: show off a chef’s talent and dazzle the diner.

Elegance, precision, harmony and technical virtuosity describe the Mansion chef’s cooking, which in the end, is all about pleasure.

His dishes can be deceptively simple, as in a trio of fat spears of roasted white asparagus last spring. Davaillon topped them with osetra caviar, paired them with hollandaise zinged with yuzu and added confit kumquats for a brilliant flavor fillip. It was spin on a classic that soared. Whether it’s batons of Berkshire pork or a fabulous fillet of Copper River salmon at the height of the season, Davaillon has a way of teasing the essence of each ingredient.

His plates can also astonish and delight. Lately I’ve been wowed by his salad of raw tuna slices that mingled lusciously with cubes of tomato jelly and creamy-textured tonnato sauce, and another of shaved raw foie gras with haricots verts, ripe late-season red plums, shaved matsutake mushrooms and a hazelnut crumble.

A year and a half ago, this young, then little-known chef made quite the splash with the opening of Driftwood, the seafood-focused Oak Cliff restaurant where he’s executive chef, his first top-toque position. Flores’ cooking was so impressive out of the gate that it quickly earned four stars for the restaurant and a place among last year’s Best in DFW: Chefs for Flores.

Far too many chefs seem to relax after the reviews come in, but Flores has not only continued to delight, his cooking has been even more spectacular. He set off fireworks on the plate in May with a starter of Japanese hamachi tartare with pickled ramps and serrano chile topped with avocado ice cream and accented with kumquat and black sesame purée. Then he sent out a magnificent fillet of Ora King salmon in a blood-orange-kissed bouillabaisse broth with baby artichokes and sweet littleneck clams. It’s cooking that’s daring, original, delicious.

Doing double-duty as pastry chef, Flores also manages to turn out some of the most alluringly sophisticated desserts in town.

Flores and Driftwood owner Jonn Baudoin are poised to open a modern Spanish restaurant, Casa Rubia, at Trinity Groves. It’ll be exciting to see what Flores cooks up there.

One of the great things about living in Dallas is that, thanks to chef-owner Teiichi Sakurai, you can always get a great meal at Tei-An.

It can be something as sublimely basic as his handmade soba or what’s probably the city’s best bowl of tonkotsu ramen, or as astonishingly, vibrantly delicious as live sea urchin, its spines waving gently as the roe travels from chopsticks to lips. (It’s not live when you eat it, though it was a minute or three before, when Sakurai prepared it.) Sakurai’s meat dishes, like preternaturally tender 48-hour-braised Angus beef, are as soulful as his explorations of raw fish are exhilarating.

Recently I was bowled over by his Dungeness crab and sea urchin risotto, voluptuously rich and nuanced, more sweet crab than risotto, served in a crab shell and strewn with Brussels sprout petals.

Energetic, quixotic, excitable and often exciting, Tesar has been making waves on the Dallas scene for years, leaving his mark in significant ways.

He helped redefine fine dining in Dallas when he took over the kitchen at the Mansion in 2006, earning five stars for the restaurant in 2006 and 2008 (he left in 2009). He opened up the city to the creative possibilities of seafood in 2011 when he was consulting chef at Dallas Fish Market; soon thereafter, he set the Cedars Social on exciting gastronomic footing when he created its debut menu.

That same year, he opened the Commissary, giving glamorous new life to the humble hamburger. With the debut of his Spoon Bar and Kitchen one year ago — and seafood as his chosen medium — he has now established himself as one of the city’s most important and influential chefs.

His crudos, gorgeous, precise, delicate and texturally dynamic, are fabulous. Tesar’s smoked sturgeon and eel headcheese is one of the most memorable dishes of the past year.

Since it opened in late 2010 and earned a five-star review two months later, Uygur’s Bishop Arts Italian tiny trattoria has been the toughest reservation in Dallas.

Uygur’s cooking continues to wow — most recently with crostini blanketed with shaved lardo and grated Burgundy truffles with the texture of snowflakes; the unctuous lardo amplified the delicately sublime flavor of the truffles. His handmade pastas are sensual treats, such as envelope-like capellacci filled with a rich and earthy purée of parsnip and ricotta, bathed in a buttery sauce scattered with rye crumbs and crowned with briny trout roe.

In August, Uygur filled caramelle, looking like paper-wrapped candies with twisted ends, with a luxuriously earthy chicken liver mousse and bathed them in a butter-lemon- shallot sauce with bites of fresh porcini mushrooms and capers.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a killer veal chop exploding with flavor, Lucia’s the place.

Zenner burst on the scene earlier this year with the debut of this stylish, intimate spot in Uptown. In a four-star review, I called his dishes “not only sexy and original” but also “satisfying enough to make you fall in love with small plates all over again.” Since then, the restaurant has moved away from its original small plates-only format; it now offers large plates as main courses, along with small plates — wonderful as ever — as starters.

Zenner’s cooking is accomplished, exciting and inspired. A fabulous dinner in September began with a crudo of Hokkaido scallop whose delicate flavor and texture were set off with tangy bits of jackfruit and crinkly, crunchy wood ear mushroom. Zenner pulled those flavors smartly together with a fish-sauce caramel. Another starter matched soft shavings of lardo with the unlikely partners of white anchovy, capers and ripe tomato — pretty brilliant. His whole deep-fried branzino served with a beautifully herbal and zingy green chermoula made for a dramatic main course. For some reason, Belly and Trumpet hasn’t caught on with the crowds. But discerning diners should do themselves a favor and check it out, because Zenner is the real deal.